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September 2017 New Package Picks

There were so many interesting ideas among the 222 new packages that made it to CRAN in September that I found it exceptionally difficult to decide on the “Top 40” packages. In the end, I only managed to limit my selection to 40 by avoiding all packages that I would normally classify under “Data”: packages that are primarily intended to provide access to some data source. I hope to make up for this by providing a list of data packages sometime soon.

Below are my picks for September’s Top 40 in six categories: Computational Methods, Machine Learning, Science, Statistics, Utilities, and Visualizations.

Computational Methods

DES v1.0.0: Implements an event-oriented approach to Discrete Event Simulation. There is a tutorial.

Rlinsolve v0.1.1: Implements iterative solvers for sparse linear systems of equations, including basic stationary iterative solvers using Jacobi, Gauss-Seidel, Successive Over-Relaxation and SSOR methods and non-stationary, Krylov subspace methods. There is a vignette to get started. Detailed descriptions may be found in the SIAM book.

DMRnet v0.1.0: Provides model selection algorithms for regression and classification, where the predictors can be numerical and categorical and the number of regressors exceeds the number of observations. See the papers by Maj-Kańska et al. and Pokarowski and Mielniczuk for the mathematical details.

leabRa v0.1.0: Implements the Leabra (local, error-driven and associative, biologically realistic algorithm) that allows for the construction of artificial neural networks that are biologically realistic, and balances supervised and unsupervised learning within a single framework. See the vignette to get started and look here for details.

lime v0.3.0: Is a port of the Python package, which attempts to explain the outcome of black-box models by fitting local models around the points of interest. Look here for details. There is a vignette to get you started.

udpipe v0.1.1: Provides a natural-language-processing toolkit for tokenization, parts-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing of raw text. For details, see this paper and the vignettes on Annotating Text and Model Building.

mosaicModel v0.3.0: Provides functions for evaluating, displaying, and interpreting statistical models with the goal of abstracting the operations on models from the particular architecture of the model. The vignette shows how to use the package.

odr v0.3.2: Provides methods for calculating the optimal sample allocation that minimizes variance of treatment effects in a multilevel randomized trial under fixed budget and cost structure, and for performing power analyses with and without accommodating costs and budget. There is a vignette.

tscount v1.4.0: Implements likelihood-based methods for model fitting and assessment, prediction, and intervention analysis of count time series following generalized linear models. The vignette provides the details.

keyring v1.0.0: Provides a platform-independent API to access the operating system’s credential store. It currently supports: Keychain on macOS, The Credential Store on Windows, the Secret Service API on Linux, and a simple, platform-independent store implemented with environment variables.

spiderbar v0.2.0: Provides a wrapper for the rep-cpp C++ library for processing robots.txt files in accordance with the The Robots Exclusion Protocol, a set of standards for allowing or excluding robot/spider crawling of different areas of site content. Look in the README for an example of how to use the package.

tibbletime v0.0.2: Is an extension of the tibble package that allows for the creation of time-aware tibbles. Some immediate advantages include: the ability to perform time-based subsetting on tibbles, quickly summarising and aggregating results by time periods, and calling functions similar in spirit to the map family from purrr on time-based tibbles. There is an Introduction and vignettes on Time-based Filtering, Changing Periodicity, and Rolling Calculaions.

Visualizations

egg v0.2.0: Provides miscellaneous functions to customize ggplot2 plots, including high-level functions to post-process layouts and allow alignment between plot panels, as well as setting panel sizes to fixed values. There is an Overview and a vignette for laying out multiple plots on a page.

ggridges v0.4.1: Extends ggplot2 to enable ridgeline plots, which are a way of visualizing changes in distributions over time or space. There is an introduction and a gallery of examples.